Guy Clark is also 71 and a cancer survivor who has thrived in Nashville, not by writing hit songs, but by writing remarkable ones. His “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “L.A. Freeway,” “Randall Knife” and “Dublin Blues” are considered among the most eloquent and emotionally compelling songs ever written in Nashville.

This was the early 1970s, and Clement was already an industry legend who had produced Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, he’d launched African-American singer Charley Pride to country stardom, he was having success with idiosyncratic folk-turned-country singer Don Williams, and he was known to favor unconventional writers. (Van Zandt was one: He never met a convention he couldn’t un.)

“Jack said, ‘You know where you are, boy?’ ” recounts Taylor, who remains a Jack Clement admirer. “I said, ‘Yessir.’ Townes was in the corner, mirror sunglasses on, pulling his hat down. Jack said, ‘You got this song that is 11 minutes long, and it’s about an Indian, ain’t it?’ I said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘Boy, you write some good songs. But you are in Nashville. I couldn’t sell a song that’s 11 minutes long if it was about (women), and you’ve got an 11-minute song about an Indian.’ Jack was right. I tucked tail out of Nashville and came back home.”

“There are those times when you’re shooting someone who isn’t comfortable,” says McGuire.

Oh, and here we should note that McGuire is not a marksman.

He’s a photographer, and for the past four decades he’s amassed a marvelous collection of photographs of Nashville musicians, a collection that is delightful when considered for its artistic value and crucial when considered as a historical documentation of Music City’s musicians.

Bonnie Raitt will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Americana Awards and Honors (photo: File / The Tennessean).

In August 2011, folks within the Nashville-based Americana Music Association were amused to learn that the musical genre they promote was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The dictionary dubbed Americana “a genre of American music with roots in early folk and country music.”

A little more than a year later, as the 13th annual Americana Music Festival & Conference prepares to set up shop in Nashville Wednesday through Sept. 15, the Merriam-Webster gang might want to broaden that entry a bit.

This year, the association is showing that “Americana” is a highly inclusive term. The roughly 100 participating acts at this year’s event range from folk favorites to R&B icons to rock mainstays and an exciting faction of young performers that could push the genre’s boundaries in the years to come.

Their sounds may be diverse, but the association’s executive director Jed Hilly believes the artists are united in their principle and approach.

“They’re not writing songs and making music to sell out Madison Square Garden or have a No. 1 hit at radio,” he says. “These artists are all working to tell a story through song in the best way they can. That’s their driving mission.”

Still, plenty of artists at this year’s festival — and the annual Honors & Awards show, which takes place at Ryman Auditorium on Wednesday — are no strangers to huge hits and arena-size audiences.

And when their crowds combine at the festival, it can make for a uniquely passionate audience.

“It’s a really focused group of people who take music seriously,” says Sara Watkins, who makes a return trip to the festival in support of her second solo album. “I think the people who come to these things are proud of their musical taste and put a lot of thought into it. ... They’re not passive listeners, they’re active, and they try to engage in the music as much as possible.”

That passion has led to sizable commercial success for a number of association-aligned artists. Robert Plant’s “Band of Joy” — which was named album of the year at last year’s Honors & Awards show and featured the talents of genre stars including Buddy Miller and Patty Griffin — debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard album chart. The Civil Wars, 2011 festival performers, have sold more than 400,000 copies of their independently released album “Barton Hollow.”

Hilly also cites recent releases from Raitt, the Lumineers, Alabama Shakes and Mumford & Sons — some of which had fractions of the budgets of the pop fare they share chart space with.

“That’s the business I want to be in,” he says. “Artists that are making music because they’re passionate about it, and that’s what has legs.”

Those within the music business have taken note: Spotify, TopSpin and SiriusXM are among the companies represented at the Americana Music Conference. Hilly says Americana Music Association membership rose from roughly 1,100 to 1,600 members in the past year. The number of musical acts submitting to perform at the festival nearly doubled this year from 800 to 1,400. A number of newcomers — following a similar path as young roots-pop/rock successes like Mumford & Sons, Alabama Shakes and The Civil Wars — made the cut.

One of the fresh faces is Max Gomez, a 25-year-old singer-songwriter from Taos, N.M., who cites Townes Van Zandt and John Prine among his influences. Gomez is playing in Nashville for the first time at the festival and reserved an extra day in his schedule to see other showcases and possibly meet a few of his heroes.

“There’s definitely a surge of younger people becoming more attracted to Americana and that kind of stuff,” he says. “Everybody nowadays is buying vinyl. You go to L.A., and all the hipster kids are listening to music on record players and collecting old stuff. The old thing is coming around again, and it’s really cool.”

As the festival’s future seems secure, local Americana fans hope that future involves Nashville, particularly as the International Bluegrass Music Association’s festival and awards ceremony plans to leave Nashville next year for a three-year stay in North Carolina.

While the association announced this year’s awards nominees at a special event in Los Angeles earlier this year, Hilly says, it would be hard for the main event to leave Ryman Auditorium.

“Nashville’s awesome,” he says. “I’m honored to be a part of making sure people know that it’s not just that neon exterior. I think we represent the heart and soul of this town.”

Tickets: $50 wristbands are available at www.ticketweb.com until Tuesday. Wristbands grant admission to all evening showcases throughout the festival. Individual admission prices will be charged at the door for single showcases. Conference badges — $350 for association members, $450 for non-members — grant access to all sanctioned daytime conference music, panels and parties, plus priority access to all evening showcases. Purchase of the registration badge also includes one ticket to the Americana Honors & Awards show.

By his own estimation, John Lomax III is a musical catalyst. And a producer, and a manager, and a publisher. And a journalist. And a historian. And an author. And an exporter.

And a sucker for a lost cause.

“I learned long ago to just follow my musical heart, unfortunately,” he says, sitting in a home office jammed with albums, CDs, books, posters and such.

The “unfortunately” part is true enough, at least if we’re talking about achieving the goal Lomax held for himself in the 1970s, which was to “go on to fame and glory and be a big shot with money and groupies and everything.” Lomax’s penchant for favoring talent over marketability has left him without an abundance of money or groupies.

That was a moment of significant hope, right before Konopka announced the winner, mumbling something that sounded to me like, “Definitely not Peter Cooper.”

That’s right, you are reading the word stylings of the Grammy-losingest columnist in Nashville history.

I was nominated with my pal and singing partner Eric Brace for co-producing I Love: Tom T. Hall’s Songs of Fox Hollow. We recorded new versions of Tom T.’s circa-1970s children’s songs, like “I Love,” “I Care” and “Sneaky Snake,” songs that were a big part of my childhood. Tom T. and his wife, songwriter Dixie Hall, invited us to record at their home studio, and we gathered a bunch of our favorite musicians for a big and joyful time.

The impetus for the project was the birth of my son, Baker, who attended the recording sessions at the ripe old age of 10 weeks. I wanted him to grow up hearing these great songs, sung by his dad and by people he would grow to know and care about.

I dedicate my Grammy loss to him.

How come losers don’t get to send out press releases? Here’s one:

“Peter Cooper and Eric Brace are disgusted and perturbed after I Love: Tom T. Hall’s Songs of Fox Hollow was not named best children’s album of 2011 at the 54th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Townes Van Zandt, shown here in 1995, wrote the country hits “If I Needed You” and “Pancho and Lefty” and gained a cult following for his blues-inspired recordings about life’s losers. He died in 1997 at age 52 (Mark Humphrey / Associated Press).

It’ll be 15 years ago, this coming Sunday.

That’s when Townes Van Zandt died. He was 52, and worse for wear, and folks had been calling him “The late, great Townes Van Zandt” since the early 1970s. Like Hank Williams, he died on New Year’s Day. Like Hank Williams, his death is officially listed as a heart attack. Like Hank Williams, bad habits figured prominently in the sorrowful end.

Townes wasn’t a friend — I wish he had been — but I met him several times, I admired him and I knew his songs better than the back of my hand. (Full disclosure: I’ve spent very little time observing the back of my hand, and I probably couldn’t tell it from the back of your hand. Still, I did a lot of listening to Townes Van Zandt.) I saw enough mid-1990s concerts to realize he wasn’t on any positive path. He’d forget lyrics, talk incoherently and behave as a dulled genius, as a shell of the man who had written some of the most singular and compelling songs in American music.

Van Zandt was beloved, revered by songwriters and aficionados and certainly by his friends and family in Tennessee and in his native Texas, but he wasn’t really famous. Reporting Van Zandt’s death, an Associated Press reporter wrote that he had “gained a cult following for his blues-inspired recordings.”Continue reading →

Peter Cooper is the senior music writer and columnist for The Tennessean.

Hello, Thanksgiving morning.

Today, I’m thankful I’m not a music critic.

People call me that sometimes, but it’s not really true.

I’ve heard that there are two kinds of music: good and bad. And that’s not really true, either.

Townes Van Zandt, the late and sorely missed Nashville singer-songwriter, said there were two kinds of music: the blues and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

That is probably true.

And I like both.

There’s music that moves me, and music that doesn’t. And there’s music I dearly love, and music I don’t. And, truth be told, if you play the Luke Bryan-sung song “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” in my presence, I get a weird, metallic taste in my mouth.

But that doesn’t mean “Country Girl (Shake It for Me)” is a bad song. It speaks to plenty of folks, including those for whom it has been shaken and those who long for it to be shaken for them, especially by a country girl.

The album is due for an August 16 release, and it features Clark classics including “L.A. Freeway,” “Dublin Blues” and “Homegrown Tomatoes” along with songs penned by Thompson, Clark and the late Townes Van Zandt. Before offering up a version of Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You,” Clark tells the story of the evening Van Zandt wrote the song at a Chapel Avenue house they shared (and that was bulldozed two weeks ago in what songwriting fans would characterize as an affront to history).

“Townes came in for coffee one morning, picked up his guitar and laid this piece of paper on his leg and sang this song,” Clark reports on Songs and Stories. “And I said, ‘Where did that come from?’ and he said, ‘I wrote it last night in my sleep. I just rolled over and wrote it down and turned over and went back to sleep.’”

“There are mountains of notebooks, and hundreds of songs,” Gillian Welch says, pondering her creations with partner David Rawlings over the eight years following the release of 2003’s Soul Journey. “They just weren’t what we wanted to say. When you work as long as we worked and come up with nothing satisfactory, you have to examine, ‘Is it over?’ We’d hit a panic level.”

The panic has subsided, as signified by Tuesday, June 28’s release of The Harrow & The Harvest, the luminous acoustic album she and Rawlings recorded at historic Woodland Studios in East Nashville. Some reviewers are calling it a comeback album, though Welch and Rawlings have been writing, playing and singing on others’ albums and playing shows throughout what she calls “the fallow years,” and five of their co-written songs appeared on Rawlings’ solo debut, 2009’s A Friend of a Friend.

“Dave’s album was the beginning of us picking up steam,” Welch says. “I had started to doubt whether we would ever like anything we did together again, which is not a tremendously entertaining place to be. And I was never alone in this doubting: Dave and I remained completely like-minded, even in our misery. But signing off on those songs for Dave’s album was a turning point, and we wound up writing most of the new album over the next four months.”